Sledgehammer with Sparkadia

I want to be a backup singer and shake my hips for a live performance of this track… The call & response is incredibly satisfying & a little Talking Heads:

I kicked the habit. I kicked the habit. Shed my skin. Shed my skin. This is the new stuff. This is the new stuff. I go dancing in.

We couldn’t work out at the time whether the famed flute sample was in fact a flute. Apparently it’s a synthesised shakuhachi flute generated with a Fairlight CMI Series II station. Impressive.

As is the video… one of the most awarded music videos of all time: nine MTV VMAs (the most for any single video), a Brit Award, a #4 ranking on MTV’s greatest music videos ever, & the single most played video in MTV history.

It was directed by Stephen R. Johnson (also responsible for Talking Heads’ Road To Nowhere stop motion vid) and the era-defining claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation was provided by Aardman Animations (of Wallace and Gromit fame). Gabriel’s endurance of 16 hours lying beneath a sheet of glass for the animation was well worth it.

Other albums for the Tasmanian stretch of the journey included Gorillaz Plastic Beach and Depeche Mode ‘86-’98.

The Tasmanian landscape was different to what I had imagined: mangled dead woodlands and lush green knolls covered in low-hanging mist. The rolling hills were occasionally dotted with silhouette statues of dogs, emus, and farmers… Characters in a otherworldly fairytale.

This was about the time I came up with the idea of calling my freelance op & blog Calmer Than Cream. I scrawled it onto a foreshore rock in Hobart whilst the Spark guitarist & drummer Henry & Adam skipped stones across the harbour.